On a weekend of many excitements, I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Helen’s art show for the Totterdown Front Room arts trail – which we normally use as an opportunity just to have a good old nose round other people’s houses. She’d made these amazing “entomologist cases” – but the little butterflies and other beasties were in fact hand-scalpeled from vintage marbling paper.
You can find out more on her blog. But anyways, as she was selling these for an extremely reasonable price, I tried to work out, were you to take into account the cost of materials, the amount of hours spent doing the intensive, painstaking work necessary to create said paper beasties, and the cost of upkeep for her ‘factory’, which, seeing as it was her living room, would essentially be factored against her final salary, whether she was essentially running an art sweatshop, and could hold herself in contempt of the Working Time Regulations, Employment Rights Act and the national minimum wage regulations, and send herself to jail. You know, for laughs, like.
In having an idle Google around to find out a bit more about employment law (I’m boring like that), I came across a delightfully-named online company selling cheap leisurewear. They’re called, in marvellous taste, Sweatshop. And whose wares are being advertised on its homepage? Why, there’s Adidas, who Oxfam accused of ignoring worker’s rights, and who paid their Chinese workers 65 cents an hour; Asics, accused of exploiting vulnerable workers; and Nike, unchallenged champs of the whole making-small-kids-make-shiny-things-for-peanuts hullabaloo.
I’m most impressed by the company’s straight-down-the-line approach to the whole issue. It’s selling cheap sports gear, it’s called ‘Sweatshop’ – but it offers not the teeniest hint, not the smallest of visual winks, that perhaps its name is a little contentious.
Brave stuff.
Anyway. Awesome artwork, Helen!